New fiction

By Stephanie Cross

Last updated at 14:44 22 April 2008

The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman (Chatto & Windus, £11.99)

As a doctor's daughter, the angels of Life and Death are familiar to Frieda Lewis. But, her father explains, a third also exists. A shadowy figure, he often appears in human disguise and in need of help.

It is a lesson that Frieda has cause to remember as she watches over her dying son, Paul. He, however, is no angel: days before his wedding — and his death — he cheats on his fiancée Allie with her younger sister Maddy. But, then, Maddy has always been the bad sibling. When the sisters' mother Lucy was sick with cancer, it was Allie who was the responsible one.

Tragedy, transcendent love and supernatural presences: Hoffman's trademarks are all here. Indeed, the first half of this novel, teetering on the melodramatic, is almost exhaustingly incident-packed.

But as we travel back in time to the Swinging Sixties, Hoffman, too, hits her stride. Slowly we learn more about Frieda — including her love for a bruised, beautiful junkie musician — and finally Lucy, whose tragic mistake reverberates down the years.

Combining elements of The Tempest with gothic intrigue and charged, poignant romance, this is a sensuously involving second novel. At its heart is Celia Lamprey, daughter of a 16th-century sea captain.

With her pale, pearly skin, dark eyes and golden hair, Celia is beloved of the merchant Paul Pindar. But, following a disastrous shipwreck, he believes her drowned.

Miraculously she is alive, having been transported by Turkish rescuers to Constantinople to be sold into the Sultan's harem. Celia's confidante Annetta urges her to forget her former life — although she suspects that Paul has come to Constantinople in the service of the English ambassador. When a ship made of sugar sent by the English delegation becomes implicated in a poisoning at the Sultan's palace, the chances of a lovers' reunion seem to have disappeared for ever.

Intertwined with Celia's story is that of Elizabeth Stavely, a young scholar in presentday Oxford. Working on slave narratives, Elizabeth is seduced by Celia's tale. Teasing, erotic, suspenseful and expertly done.

Pilcrow by Adam Mars Jones (Faber, £18.99)

In terms of fiction, mental illness remains very much en vogue. Physical disability, however, has enjoyed much less attention — presenting, perhaps, greater difficulties for writers themselves.

Certainly, Adam Mars-Jones has set himself a formidable challenge: his boy hero is almost entirely crippled. Yet John Cromer is a remarkable child, a student of tedium, typography and toilet paper. Born in 1950, John is at first sickeningly healthy, but at the age of three, he is struck by a fever and confined indefinitely to bed.

His is an instructive vantage point: in the years that follow, John becomes a keen observer of the Cromer family. Bodily functions, too, become a fascination, and then there is print itself (a pilcrow is a paragraph mark). However, with his transference to a hospital and then to a special school, John's world grows — and with it his curiosity about just what wonders other boys' trousers might hold.

Pilcrow is an exceptionally uneventful novel, resembling a series of anti-climatic anecdotes. That said, while John's obsessions (and Mars-Jones's smugness) can irritate, this mild odyssey is oddly winning.